Trump Sells $100K-a-Month Access to Posts That Can Move a $75T Stock Market: 'An Outrageous Abuse'

Donald Trump's own company is now charging Wall Street up to a reported $100,000 (£74,200) a month for the earliest sight of his market-moving Truth Social posts. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff want the watchdog for a $76.9 trillion (£57 trillion) American stock market to investigate what they call 'an outrageous abuse of the President's office for his personal benefit.'

The product is Truth API, an application programming interface (API), which in plain terms is a feed built for trading machines to read rather than a page for people to scroll. The feed went live on Saturday, 1 August, four days after the two Democratic lawmakers wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) demanding an investigation before launch day.

What $100,000 a Month Is Said to Buy

Trump Media & Technology Group describes a licensed feed carrying the 10 accounts its platform ranks as most influential, with Trump's own at the top. The company's launch material promises delivery within milliseconds, continuous coverage, and an archive reaching back to 2022, and says customers had already signed before the service opened.

Trump Media has never published a price. The range in circulation comes from the senators' letter, which records reported subscription costs of between $60,000 (£44,500) and $100,000 a month. At the top of that range, a single desk would pay $1.2M (£890,000) a year, as the chart below shows.

The buyers being courted are high-frequency trading houses and quantitative funds, outfits whose computers act on fresh information in fractions of a second. A few milliseconds decide who trades first there, and the first sight of a presidential statement is a prize such firms will pay for.

The cheaper rate is reportedly tied to firms committing for three years, a structure that would lock in revenue for a business still waiting to record its first annual profit. Trump himself has 12.9M followers on the platform and uses the account for official statements on tariffs, military action, and the economy.

What the American Market Is Actually Worth

The market those statements reach is the largest anywhere. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) valued every United States listed company at a combined $76.9 trillion (£57 trillion) at the end of June, across 5,532 firms. That total is up 22.4% on a year earlier, as the graphic below shows.

The senators' letter walks through recent occasions when a single post moved prices. One is a June morning when Trump congratulated Citigroup by ticker just as trading opened and the shares outperformed. The letter also lists an April post praising Palantir that preceded an immediate jump, and an Intel endorsement followed by a 3% rise within hours.

The same pages note that posts on the war with Iran have whipped oil futures around, and that tariff announcements have moved equity prices almost instantly. Ordinary investors will keep receiving those statements at ordinary speed, free, while paying desks read them first.

The Legal Question Now Sitting With the SEC

The letter, dated 28 July, went to SEC chair Paul Atkins and asks for a formal legal analysis covering insider dealing and market manipulation law, with answers before switch-on. Their case is that selling speed on official pronouncements erodes confidence that markets treat everyone alike.

The conflict the senators describe rests on ownership. Trump holds roughly 41% of the company inside a revocable trust, so subscription revenue ultimately feeds his own stake, and Atkins, whom Trump appointed, now leads the agency being asked to judge it. The SEC has confirmed it received the letter and has declined to say whether an investigation will follow.

Trump Media rejects the premise outright. 'Markets already move on Truth Social posts,' Kevin McGurn, the company's interim chief executive, said when unveiling the product. Spokeswoman Shannon Devine went further, saying critics had 'invented a new theory of insider trading' built on information anyone can already see. The company also notes that exchanges and platforms have sold premium-speed data for years.

For British savers, this is not remote: workplace pensions typically track global indices dominated by those same US-listed companies, so the fairness of that market is, indirectly, the fairness of a retirement pot. When Trump Media first floated the feed in mid-July, the argument was hypothetical. Since Saturday, it has been a live product, and the next word belongs to the SEC.